Diner

They stream in continuous convoy through Alma's daydreams. Campervan, caravan, overheard conversations. Sand, sweat and fermentation.
Another 4x4 swings away through the dust, its void instantly replaced. New sparring voices to sweet'n sour the air.
A milk jelly dollop of a child stares, pokes out her purple candy tongue, squeezes a tangy yellow trail towards the condiments. Alma doodles phallically on her notepad. Looks the father straight in the eye. "Make it snappy, love." The mother shrugs with her eyes. They leave behind an echo; the squinting rasp of chair legs, salt-sting resentment. Alma closes into herself.
She blows through the girl's leftover cola straw. A fluorescent strip fizzes overhead. Bubble galaxies wink up at her through a thousand reflected pinpoints.
She puts her ear to the glass. Listens. Believes in their frothy promises of something better. Above the sky; on the planets; on the eternal glimmer-eyes of beyond.

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One hundred and thirty-five flash fiction stories from world-wide authors selected from the long lists of the three Bath Flash Fiction Awards in 2017. These dazzling fictions, all 300 words or under, give us fresh insights into world wide concerns – from relationship issues and domestic situations tender or fraught, to war torn landscapes and […]

Seventy-four micro-fictions written by presenters and participants at the first ever literary festival entirely dedicated to flash fiction, held in Bath, June 2017. These short-short stories, 250 words or under, show the wide variety of styles possible in this emerging genre. Most of the UK’s top flash fiction writers and teachers offered workshops and talks […]

Your wonderful story 'The Cool Box' won second prize in Bath Flash Fiction Award, June 2017 round judged by Meg Pokrass. Can you tell us how it came into being? I’m an obsessive hoarder, so keep old e-mail chains. At 7:30 am. on June 10th, I sent the first draft to my critique partner, Auckland […]

A multi-talented creative artist, Catherine is an inspiration in many ways. Here she tells us how being immersed in the culture of former pit villages, and a vintage picture of boys playing outside Elsecar Colliery, prompted her second prize winning story ‘The Hierarchy of Substances.’ She’s a dedicated writer who begins writing early, continues on […]

Nancy Stohlman is the author of the flash collection The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), the flash novels The Monster Opera (2013) and Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and three anthologies of flash fiction including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape (2010), which was a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. […]

We were fascinated to read that our first prize winner, Rose McDonagh, is a late night writer and has written almost every day since she was fifteen. Her winning piece was drafted in a community writing group she runs, inspired from one of her own exercises. She says, although it’s not always about getting published, […]

The third instalment of one of the most popular and esteemed series of flash fiction anthologies, The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017), is an essential read for every flash fiction writer or reader. From Matthew Baker’s island of presidential doppelgangers to Harriot West’s ekphrastic haibun story about Van Gogh’s sunflowers, each of […]

Stephanie Clement Photography Tara L. Masih is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and The Chalk Circle (both ForeWord Books of the Year), author of Where the Dog Star Never Glows, and Founding Series Editor of the Best Small Fictions series. Her flash appears in Word of Mouth, Brevity […]

Thank you to everyone who entered the October 2017 round of Bath Flash Fiction Award. As always we had a mix of those who entered before and plenty of new writers. This time we received even more entries from around the globe – nine hundred and thirty-six from thirty-four different countries. Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, […]

As a boy, I loved a story about a football player whose team had just won the FA Cup at Wembley Stadium. Sitting in the dressing room after the match, the player complained he'd lost a contact lens out on the pitch. One of his team-mates is supposed to have said, 'Well, this is our […]